The mesmeric sound that opens up Dead Can Dance's seventh studio album is not instantly identifiable. It could be a percussive instrument, or a sample; it could be a studio-treated didgeridoo - anything, in fact, out of this instrumental world. In truth, it's a bullroarer, a sculpted piece of wood attached to a rope that you swing over your head, then sampled and played though a keyboard. The point being, that after much cultural discussion of musical 'source', about organic vs. technological, 'original' vs. 'sampled', there is no distinction anymore, no boundaries, essentially no difference. It really doesn't matter. What matters is the spirit.

Similarly, Dead Can Dance's 15-year pattern of working within an expansive, quixotic musical diaspora should no longer be broken down into 'when' and 'where'. Since 1981, when Australian duo Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard moved to London to begin their musical vocation, the pair have called on traditions such as neo-classical, choral, baroque and troubadour, from both liturgical and secular origins, under a New World planetarium spanning Western and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia, North Africa, the Mediterranean and beyond. Everywhere has either been a colony, or now feels the residual effects of colonial cultures moving back to the 'motherland'. In Dead Can Dance's music, 'ethnic' has become an almost meaningless musical category.

The time-spanning, genre- and geography-defying spirit is one that has mesmerised people worldwide, as each of their albums has sold to a progressively larger audience. The epic emotional drama of their work has also come to the attention of the art, film and TV worlds too; those to have mined the Dead Can Dance catalogue include the San Francisco ballet, Hermes Perfume and a documentary on Hitler and Stalin, likewise equally diverse motion pictures such as Heat, The Crossing Guard and Baraka. Numerous musicians have sampled their work; the dance field (Future Sound of London and Black Grape, to name two) are especially attuned to the duo's vivid vistas.

That spirit is continually bound up both in Perry and Gerrard's extraordinarily affecting voices, and in the continually changing face of Dead Can Dance's music. On Spiritchaser, there is another shift, away from the distinct Gaelic qualities of 1993's Into the Labyrinth. But - to the these ears at least - a track like 'The Snake And The Moon' on the new record has definite South American influences; Gerrard hears African. "It's gone past the point of being 'this' and 'that'," she affirms. "Music has come to a new age, where we're exposed to music from all over the world, from a much larger palate of colours, as opposed to just what was available in the '50s and '60s. Our music has taken on an identity of itself. A track like 'Nierika' sounds like 'Frontier', the very first piece Brendan and I ever wrote together, at the age of 16 or 17, before we'd heard any African music."

Perry suggests that Dead Can Dance music tends to mirror the music that the pair are listening to, or have been researching - he in his converted church in Ireland (where Spiritchaser was written and recorded), and Lisa in the remote Gippsland region of Southern Australian. Perry admits he has been listening to South American music, largely from Chile and Peru, but that the roots to Spiritchaser are based in rhythm.

Perry:"With this record, I was conscious of the fact that we were delving into areas that we had worked in before, so we made a conscious decision to move away from that. We decided to set ourselves limitations in terms of instrumentation, to work from the basis of purely rhythmical means, and develop from there. I've been doing a lot of percussion workshops and doing sessions with friends and invariably we'd come back to the studio and have up to 15 people playing percussion, just to entertain ourselves, and some great ideas were generated from that. We subsequently put down a week's worth of percussion, from which 'Nierika' and 'Dedicace Outo' come."

The latter, a brief, trance pattern, is based on a Vodun rhythm from Haiti (Outo is 'the spirit of the drums'). 'The Song Of The Stars' begins with words taken from an Algonquian Indian poem, and ends with words from a Vodun invocation. Elsewhere, Dead Can Dance traverse the planet. The words to 'Song Of The Dispossessed' are Perry's, adopting a traditional latin melody to address the eternal problem of people, "whose lives have been changed for the worse."

Sometimes the nature of a song comes from it's incidental inspiration. 'The Song Of The Nile' is so named because it features the sound of real crickets from the Nile, while Perry and Gerrard agree that the track, once completed, suggests a river journey, "with rhythms of someone pushing a pole through the water, or a marsh." 'Nierika', which opens the album, is an Inuit term for the paths between the underworld, middle world and higher world that shamen travel, inspired by the 'running dogs' sound that they felt was Sami-influenced. Gerrard's 'Devorzhun' which closes the album, is an invented word of Gerrard's; the track, she says, "is a lullaby for the sleeping spirit."

For Perry, the unifying force behind the eight tracks that make up Spiritchaser, "is a search for sounds which would convey a sense of animism, to try and bring elements of nature through, like birdsong and things which suggest woods, snakes, water, atmospheres...to look for alternatives rather than conventional uses of instrumentation, to express an animal nature rather than music that was coming from a technological background."

The rhythms suggested harmonics; the harmonics suggested more diverging possibilities, and so they progressed. "making this album was an evolution of discovery more than anything," Perry reckons. "We don't discuss that much while we're working; we just know when it clicks, and become more animated. It's not an intellectual way of working, we just try to understand the emotional charge, in order to go forward."

It's a process, Perry says, that led to the title of the album. "We were looking for something that excited us, looking for the spirit, hunting it down, cornering it...we had the sense of searching for something which had meaning, something where you hear the spirits talking."

The result of which is an album that stands well apart from it's predecessors. Not since the mid-'80s have Perry and Gerrard's contributions dovetailed together, as opposed to their increasing tendency to work more in isolation. It might be because Gerrard worked on her solo album, The Mirror Pool, which 4AD released in 1995, or that the pair realised how they had become 'seperated' over the passage of time, after the dissolution of their physical relationship. Either way, it is a joy to hear the pair of them sing together much more, as if two rivers have converged to form a stronger, flowing current. their music is grounded in hybrid and fusion so it makes more sense that they follow the same aesthetic.

Gerrard:"Usually, when I listen to our records, I haven't heard it as entity, with a seperate life of its own, but this time, i've been able to sit down and not feel a little tug of war going on within the picture. We've got away with doing quite a bit more, which made the creative process a lot more intense. It was like a Siamese twin's experience: we microscopically went over everything. We found ourselves crossing each other's boundaries, and maybe doing what we know the other usually does, so it's been an important record for us."

So boundaries are crossed, and boundaries dissolved; The boundary between the studio and the stage will be crossed too when Dead Can Dance begin their world tour in June, their first since 1993, from where the live double album and video Toward The Within was taken. Besides the usual Western and Eastern European and Northern American dates, the expanded ensemble are visiting South America for the first time. It's not commonly known but, out of all 4AD's artists, Dead Can Dance are the biggest internationally - in San Francisco, for example, they are playing to 8,000 people ("I'm a bit tentative of losing the audience from the 40th row backwards," Perry ponders. "We might have to throw in some stadium rock numbers...").

Two instrumentals, both instigated in those original percussive sessions, are to be included on the tour programme. The beat goes, on in other words. Evoking the spirits; chasing the spirits, and following where they may lead.

Martin Aston, April 1996.